Contact centers (also referred to as call centers) are used by various organizations to provide communication channels to the organizations' customers. For example, various organizations may utilize contact centers so that customers may contact the organizations with regard to issues customers may be having with the organizations' products and/or to place orders for the organizations' products. Typically, a contact center employs a number of agents that assist customers who have contacted or have been contacted by the contact center. These agents are scheduled to work during various times so that the contact center may provide adequate support to handle the volume of communications received and made by the contact center.
Thus, scheduling agents for a contact center is an important and complex process to ensure the contact center is operating at an acceptable efficiency with respect to handling the volume of communications received and made by the contact center at the lowest possible cost. To achieve optimal schedules, many contact centers make use of some type of scheduling system to assist in generating and maintaining schedules for their agents. In addition, scheduling systems may make use of forecasting techniques to better predict expected communication volumes. Accordingly, enormous effort goes into forecasting workloads (e.g., expected communication volumes), calculating staffing requirements to handle the workloads, and generating schedules to meet the staffing requirements.
Once an optimal schedule has been produced, the agents' adherence to the schedule is important so that acceptable efficiency, as predicated for the schedule, is achieved. Hence, a problem encountered by many contact center operators is that their agents do not adhere to schedules. For example, in many instances, agents in a contact center may frequently not take their breaks and/or lunch when they are scheduled so that these agents can join their friends during their friends' breaks and/or lunch. Such non-adherence leads to a loss in productivity as agents are not available at optimal times to handle the communication volume the contact center is expected to receive. Thus, a need in the industry exists to improve agents' adherence to schedules, especially with respect to scheduled times when the agents will not be available to handle communications (e.g., while an agent is on a break, at lunch, or at some other activity such as a meeting or training). It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure herein is presented.